September 2020 has been the month of big gaming launches – the PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series X, and NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3080. All three were disastrous with instant sellouts / bots scooping up stock, crashed websites, and frustrated customers left empty handed being the norm. Now we come to the top-of-the-line GeForce RTX 3090 aka the BFGPU (“big ferocious GPU”) graphics card, which is slated to launch today September 24th starting at $1,499.99 for the Founder’s Edition (more for custom versions). If you have the cash and you’re feeling lucky, here’s how to get one…
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At the time of writing, NVIDIA appears to be moving forward with the September 24th launch of the RTX 3090. The 3080 card launched at 6am PST 9am EST, so that’s something to keep in mind (UPDATE: This is the expected launch time). When it does launch, you’ll find it via the retailers listed below. Note that Best Buy has an October release date listed for the Founder’s Edition and some of the third-party cards from Asus. Assuming that’s correct, other retailers might delay some of the cards as well.
Specs at a Glance:
- 24GB GDDR6X
- 10496 CUDA cores
- Base / Boost Clock: 1.4GHz / 1.7GHz
- Price: $1,499
Will the RTX 3090 launch be any different than the 3080? Well, the price of the 3090 will certainly reduce demand compared to $699.99 for the more practical 3080. NVIDIA also had the following to say about what they’ve changed to avoid another pre-order debacle:
“As with many other retailers, the NVIDIA Store was also overrun with malicious bots and resellers. To combat this challenge we have made the following changes: we moved our NVIDIA Store to a dedicated environment, with increased capacity and more bot protection. We updated the code to be more efficient on the server load. We integrated CAPTCHA to the checkout flow to help offset the use of bots. We implemented additional security protections to the store APIs. And more efforts are underway.”
NVIDIA claimed that they “underestimated demand” even though this situation occurs time and time again with manufacturers dropping hot new products. The need for serious anti-scalper bot measures is obvious – the upgrade NVIDA made recently seems like something that should have been done a long time ago.
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